Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

In Plane Crash Coverage, Networks Use the Word ‘Terrorism’ With Care

Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn describing the small plane crash in Austin, cable news anchors repeatedly cautioned that there was no immediate link to terrorism.

The early bulletins from Austin, Tex., were chilling: “small plane into a building.”

Cable news anchors, who make a living partly by speculating about the news, tried to strike a balance between alarming viewers and explaining what they did and did not know. Repeatedly, the anchors cautioned that there was no immediate link to terrorism.

“Whether this was simply an accident or, uh, something intentional, we do not know, but we’re told that the building houses the local offices of the F.B.I.,” the Fox News Channel anchor Jon Scott said in the network’s first report.

The report about the F.B.I. turned out to be inaccurate (the office was nearby, not in the same building), but the anchors were wise to speak with caution. About an hour later, the cable channels began reporting that the crash into a commercial building had been an intentional act, possibly aimed at the Internal Revenue Service office in the building.

At that point, Mr. Scott on Fox started using the phrase “domestic terrorism,” and he mentioned Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

“This appears to be, at this point, some kind of, I guess you would call it, domestic terrorism,” he said just before 1 p.m. Eastern.

The subtext on cable news today is this: what is the definition of terrorism?

At a news conference in Austin during the 1 p.m. Eastern hour, a local police chief said categorically that the incident was not an act of terrorism.

There are “a couple of reasons to say that,” the NBC correspondent Pete Williams observed on MSNBC. “One is he’s an American citizen. But that doesn’t rule out an act of terrorism. Timothy McVeigh, of course, was an American citizen as well, and that was the biggest act of terrorism in the U.S. before 9/11.”

On CNN, the homeland security correspondent Jeanne Meserve reported that the Department of Homeland Security had originally said there was “no reason to believe there was a nexus to criminal or terrorist activity,” then adjusted the statement to say there was “no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity,” removing the word criminal.

Back on Fox during the 1 p.m. hour, the anchor Megyn Kelly asked the correspondent Catherine Herridge, “I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?”

“They mean terrorism in that capital T way,” Ms. Herridge said. “If it does turn out to be an intentional act, that could be something entirely separate.”